McCain: The old one's back, and just in time

An old friend came back to town last week and it was good to see him again after all these years.

Because we really needed him, now more than ever.

John McCain -- the old straight-talking, tough truth-telling John McCain --- stood up on the floor of the U.S. Senate and picked up just where he'd left off some four years ago: Telling it like it really is. Never mind that he was ticking off fellow conservative Republicans. Even the ones who knew in their hearts he was right.

For months, Republican leaders had allowed themselves to be led by the new Tea Party House members and other outspoken conservatives who wanted to lead America into a perilous game of global economic chicken. And risked plunging the United States into default on its debts by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, as even Presidents Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 routinely did. They pooh-poohed notions that default would become inevitable, and all Americans would be hit with a de facto tax increase in the form of higher interest rates.

Until The Old McCain spoke out as no prominent Republican had dared to do:

"... The message you send to the world, not just our markets but to the world, that the United States of America is going to default on its debts is a totally unacceptable scenario and beneath a great nation."

In a rare colloquy with the Senate's second-ranking Democratic leader, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., McCain also took on his own Republican leaders for insisting any Senate bill increasing the debt ceiling must also amend the U.S. Constitution to require balanced budgets. In the process, McCain's old anger flashed in ways we haven't seen in years.

McCain: "... To insist that any agreement is based on the passage through the United States Senate of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as I said before, is not fair to the American people, because the terrible obstructionists on this side of the aisle, the terrible people there, their flawed philosophical views about the future of America is not going to allow us to get 20 additional votes from your Democratic side -- assuming that you get all 47, since it requires 67 votes to pass a balanced budget amendment under the Constitution."

Understand that McCain personally favors a balanced budget constitutional amendment. But he knows it can't happen now -- and with the conscience of a principled conservative he felt he had to speak out.

That's precisely what he'd stopped doing ever since he began courting Republican primary voters in his 2008 presidential campaign. Then he kept his maverick self muzzled in his 2010 Senate re-election campaign, while spending $21 million to defeat a very conservative Republican primary challenger.

Come to think of it: McCain took on Republicans in a way that was far more gutsy than anything we have heard in some time from the Democrat whom McCain ran against in 2008. President Barack Obama not only felt forced to yield to Republicans on virtually every substantive policy issue to get the debt ceiling raised, he also found he could not negotiate with Republican leaders while attacking their tactics as bluntly as McCain just did.

Obama's statements in his final days of Debt Ceiling Deal-making came off as academic -- and, many of his fellow liberals would say, "anemic." Then again, many of those liberals no longer call him a liberal.

In terms of policy shifting, Obama probably moved more toward the center from the left (especially in abandoning his demand that the higher Bush-era tax rate be restored for the wealthy and well-to-do), than McCain ever did in his move toward moderation from the right.

Now hear again the echoes of McCain's colloquy -- as he called out fellow Republicans as "terrible obstructionists ... terrible people" with "flawed philosophical views." And, recall that liberated look in McCain's eye and the smile on his face.

So what if Joe Biden wants to move over and fulfill his old lifelong goal of being secretary of state. Did we just hear the audition tape of Obama's new bipartisan era veep?